AWS Tip: Shrinking EBS Root Volume Size

Amazon's Elastic Block Store volumes are easy to use and expand but notoriously hard to shrink once their size has grown. Here is my tip for shrinking EBS size and saving some money from over-provisioned storage. I'm assuming that you want to shrink the root volume which is on EBS.

• Write down the block device name for the root volume (/dev/sda1) - from AWS console: Instances; Select instance; Look at Details tab; See Root device or Block devices;
• Write down the availability zone of your instance - from AWS console: Instances; column Availability Zone;
• Stop instance;
• Create snapshot of the root volume;
• From the snapshot, create a second volume, in the same availability zone as your instance (you will have to attach it later). This will be your pristine source;
• Create new empty EBS volume (not based on a snapshot), with smaller size, in the same availability zone - from AWS console: Volumes; Create Volume; Snapshot == No Snapshot; IMPORTANT - size should be large enough to hold all the files from the source file system (try df -h on the source first);
• Attach both volumes to instance while taking note of the block devices names you assign for them in the AWS console;

For example: In my case /dev/sdc1 is the source snapshot and /dev/sdd1 is the empty target.

• Start instance;
• Optionally check the source file system with e2fsck -f /dev/sdc1;
• Create a file system for the empty volume - mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdd1;
• Mount volumes at /source and /target respectively;
• Now sync the files: rsync -aHAXxSP /source/ /target. Note the missing slash (/) after /target. If you add it you will end up with files inside /target/source/ which you don't want;
• Quickly verify the new directory structure with ls -l /target;
• Unmount /target;
• Optionally check the new file system for consistency e2fsck -f /dev/sdd1;
• IMPORTANT - check how /boot/grub/grub.conf specifies the root volume - by UUID, by LABEL, by device name, etc. You will have to duplicate the same for the new smaller volume or update /target/boot/grub/grub.conf to match the new volume. Check /target/etc/fstab as well!

In my case I had to e2label /dev/sdd1 / because both grub.conf and fstab were using the device label.

• Shutdown the instance;
• Detach all volumes;
• IMPORTANT - attach the new smaller volume to the instance using the same block device name from the first step (e.g. /dev/sda1);
• Start the instance and verify it is working correctly;
• DELETE auxiliary volumes and snapshots so they don't take space and accumulate costs!